Bortolami Gallery

This week starts off and ends a little slowly, but Wednesday to Friday ought to be pretty great. Spend your hump-day checking out openings at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Lewis, where a group show and a solo show by painter Megan Marrin, respectively, look to have a much-needed sense of humor. Thursday night Condo New York kicks-off, […]

We don’t live in happy times, and that’s starting to show. With the exception of Art404’s video game show opening Wednesday at the AC Institute and Todd Bienvenu’s likely-hilarious beach paintings opening at yours mine & ours, there’s not a lot of lighthearted fun in the art world this week. Hell, even Art404’s show features a virtual reality space where the viewer is suffocated by news.

The doom-and-gloom kicks off with Bortolami Gallery’s University of Disasters Tuesday night, though Equity Gallery is opening Not the End on Friday, another show about anxiety with a somewhat more optimistic name. Sunday, the Queens Museum will be opening Italian artist Marinella Senatore’s solo show, which deals with protest and social space. Obviously, we all have the dire political situation on our minds.

Whitney: Scott King’s graphic short story was a solid, if simplistic, ‘fuck you’ to top-down charity models where the people with lots of money make all the decisions about how money would best be redistributed to poor people.

We’ve entered the season of group shows. Tonight, attend the Chashama Gala and support an organization that has tirelessly worked to provide free and low-cost studios for artists. Friday, check out Bad Girls at Klaus Von Nichtssagend, a contemporary take on the now famed 1990’s touring feminist museum exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker. And Saturday, spend some time at Picture Ray Studio with some of our favorite photo editors at Mossless. Their third issue drops that day.

Painter Piotr Janas’s exhibition Minotaurs at Bortolami is nothing if not commanding. The unadorned exhibition space is dominated by nine simultaneously stark and organic large-scale paintings of geometry and viscera. Seeing man’s guts strung out in these form-scapes makes the message very clear: Never forget how ugly your humanity is; never pretend it’s noble.

Who’s looking forward to sweating profusely this week at a bunch of crowded openings? I know I am! The question is, at which openings shall we sweat? I polled the AFC staff to come up with a few targets for the month. These are the results.